Category Archives: education

Multiliteracies: Thinking “Beyond New London” (at DMLcentral)

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My latest post at DMLcentral is about the future of literacy research. I am interested in collaborating with other stakeholders around the question of how are literacies shifting currently. Though the text is cross-posted below, please consider commenting over at DMLcentral to continue this conversation.

 

Multiliteracies is an area of interest for me and my classroom, and I am hoping to use this post for dialogue and collective theory-building. But first, I want to talk briefly about being a book geek. As an English teacher, I am passionate about literature. During my first two years in the classroom I overextended myself by maintaining an evening and weekend job assistant managing a popular independent bookstore in Los Angeles.

Passion, Teaching, and Literacy

The pay was paltry and secondary to the opportunity I had at first dibs for advanced readers’ copies of works by my favorite novelists – not to mention engagement with local literati, and the opportunity to discover personal favorites through customer recommendations, fellow employees, and random books falling on my head while shelving the particularly tall bookcases.

I’ve written elsewhere why this kind of passion is a key component to successfully engaging students. Passion is contagious; it was my bookstore co-worker, Nancy, enthusiastically talking about the growing complexities of J.K. Rowling’s work that eventually compelled me to bother breaking the spine and entering the world of Hogwarts.

All of this is to say that I’ve become interested, now as an educator and researcher, into the changing and fluid world of literacy development.

Multiliteracies and Thinking about Literacy beyond 2011

As a 21st century teacher, the work of the New London Group – their conceptualization ofmultiliteracies – is not only a breath of fresh air, but it also liberates my approach to English Language Arts instruction when I guide the learning needs of my ninth graders.

Briefly, the major principles of a multiliteracies framework relate to how technology is fundamentally changing the ways people are communicating: It is  bringing people into closer proximity to one another, and the forms of communication in which people engage are multimodal, meaning that they incorporate word, image, video and sound.

And so it was at this year’s American Education Research Association conference last April that I eagerly joined a crowded room to see many members of the New London Group speak in a session titled “Beyond New London: Literacy, Learning and the Design of Social Futures.” And while I was excited about the potential of this session, I left feeling that the researchers, for the most part, didn’t talk about what is happening in literacy development, nor did they update the concept of multiliteracies or point toward reasonable responses to this work.

My interest is, where is literacy heading? What are the implications for the students in my classroom and the literacy achievement gap in general?

Literacies are multitudinous and text is a fluid concept that moves beyond the printed page. This much educators and researchers are generally accepting in this day and age (thank you, New London).

However, in 1996, when “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” was published, social networks were not a norm, Google did not yet exist (nor did YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), and mobile media devices were owned and used by an exclusive and small sector of young people. In short, the work does not account for the significant ways young people are interactive and learning today.

I want to outline a few ideas about how I see literacy expanding today. These are initial thoughts and I hope we can engage in collective development around what you may think as well. There are three developments in literacy that are under-recognized in classrooms, in policy, and in empirical learning theory research:

1. Search, Query, and Interpretation

2. Conscious identity development

3. Online/Offline Hybridity and Spatial Interaction

Search, Query, and Interpretation

To effectively navigate, produce, and communicate within the participatory structures both online and offline, students today need to understand the ways that search functions. Black hat & white hat search optimization, for instance is an innately complicated idea that directly impacts what students see and interact with through online spaces. Likewise, the tenets of something like Google’s search algorithm dictate what students are allowed to “find.” In this instance, seemingly ubiquitous engines like Google and Bing act as gatekeepers for counternarratives that are published online but suppressed by a page’s ranking. Douglas Rushkoff’s warning, Program or be Programmed, paves the away for thinking about how students need to be equipped to not only understand why they are seeing the products online when they search academically and recreationally, but also to think about how students can develop search tools for themselves – these computational and programming literacies are going to be the second language acquisition tools students will need to master.

Conscious identity development

Related to interpreting and understanding search-like tools, it is necessary for young people to recognize the way students read and view texts online reifies specific hegemonic ways of being. As a quick example, if students search for images online of their community or a profession they aspire to work within, the images they see dictate an aggregate normative understanding; the narratives online of urban youth perpetuate stereotypes and students should be able to read these narratives critically. Likewise, when students develop and shape online personas inMMORPGs, social networks, and online discourse, they are consciously involved in personal (and sometimes collective) identity development. These literacy practices directly impact the images, words, videos, and other myriad media products that a larger and larger public sees and interprets vis-a-vis youth identity.

Online/Offline Hybridism and Spatial Interaction

Finally, and perhaps what most teachers are seeing within their classrooms, students are utilizing online tools to mediate predominantly offline relationships. When students are texting in my classroom or posting updates to their Facebook pages, they are doing so mainly to maintain a closeness to peers and friends are usually interacting with on a daily basis. Students mediate their day-to-day physical world decisions through online tools. This hybrid media interaction is a space that is becoming more and more persistent in classrooms. Asking a group of my 9th graders if they text or are on Facebook as frequently during lunch or after school, the students rolled their eyes incredulously: of course not – they are busy socializing with the friends they’ve been texting and communicating with when they were supposed to be silent reading in my classroom.

Collaborating Around a new Framework

Without the New London research and much that has since followed, this conversation would not be anchored within meaningful discourse. I am hoping for this to be the start of an ongoing formation of post-New London Theory building. I am interested in the space where this work can be done.

Fifteen years ago, when the authors of “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” met at the New London site, they purposely published their article in the Harvard Education Review without their names attached. Though the identity of the authors of the piece was not a conspiratorial secret, the gesture is significant. I am hoping those individuals interested in participating in shaping a renewed framework of multiliteracies can comment below and we can discuss an open space for this conversation to continue. Ultimately, I’d hope for a group of us to share this work’s developments in a future post & perhaps wherever else this work can directly impact classroom practices and research.

Doing Things Correctly on Google Plus: Social Networks, Youth Practices and What Educators Need to Know about Appropriation

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Part of my current ongoing goal of this blog is to provide a continuing understanding of social networks and their role in the shifting nature of the new culture of learning. While I’ve only played with it for two weeks at this point, I can say that Google Plus (Google+) is a significant step forward in terms of how to manage, engage, and mediate learning personally and when interacting with youth, pre-service & in-service teachers (the current contexts in which I teach).

Although there are useful guides elsewhere about how Google+ is different & useful for educators, I think the possibilities of the new pool of information lies not in a single component than in the convergence of the myriad features to provide a customized learning experience for a group of co-inquirers.

As I’ve dabbled at posting and “being” on Google+, I am conscious of the ways I post, comment, and share. I do it deliberately. Cautiously. Worried that I’m not “doing it right.” Using a Chrome extension, I tried to share with a circle of friends a link to something I found funny. I made a note that I was “In tears” (implying because of how funny it was). Of course, the way I ended up submitting this link ended up actually omitting the shared content. My social network instead received the wrong message that I was likely upset and “In tears.”

And while such blundering examples are innate as we better understand the tools we are equipping ourselves with, I am more interested in this moment of self reflection and metacognition that occurs as I (and I’m sure most of you) wonder if you’re using Google+ “correctly.” I wonder about this because this feeling is one that is mediated by the immediate culture we surround ourselves with in these virtual networks (and on-line/off-line friendships). “Correct” use of this network is only as what is dictated by the practices I see reinforced by the people I follow and share in circles.

As an example, I want to turn to Facebook briefly. The migration of my students from MySpace to Facebook has been significant and swift. Within a year, MySpace is bereft of its biggest demographic as Facebook accounts become the ubiquitous cache of legitimate online student identity. As I watched a generally new demographic utilize a social network that was initially populated by people around my own age, I was intrigued by the differences in use. I often see a student post a status update that would be followed by dozens of comments. Looking at these, students were utilizing the commenting space on Facebook to engage in conversation. Often only one or two participants would rapidly fire comments back and forth to have publicized chat logs (some extremely personal in nature). I remember distinctly thinking “that’s not how you use this component or tool.” For me, such conversation we to be conducted in a chat window (isn’t that why it’s available on Facebook?), through a private message, or – ideally – in “real” life. I didn’t understand that I was naturally ascribing my own rules of use on a cultural practice that was not my own.

danah boyd writes about “Networked Privacy” and this is a useful realm to better understand other ways students are using Facebook differently (and just as “correctly”) as many of my own peers.

Part of why my use of MySpace in the past was successful is because I asked and watched how youth were using the site. I incorporated elements of what they did, closed off the reaches of my social network so it was not as invasive as they may have felt, and ultimately found a medium between youth cultural use of MySpace and academic use of the site for my group of learners.

As we steadily proceed up a naturally developed learning curve around Google+ it is a useful time to remember that educational use of these social networks is going to have to largely be negotiated with our youth constituents. We will all have different online registers in how we are utilizing this new tool. We will all be utilizing it differently and “correctly.” In order for this use to be effective in the context of sociocultural learning, we will have to collaborate around how to engage with Google+ (or Facebook or MySpace or Friendster etc.). To simply appropriate these tools and monopolize them in constrained ways will ultimately fail. I’m looking forward to sharing and learning about the different and “correct” ways we will be learning with a site like Google+ in the future.

Thinking Through Literary Interconnectedness and Dissertation Format (Another Cheap Rehash: Sonic Nurse Album Review)

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Working through analysis, I had a (brief and fleeting) moment of clarity in terms of structure of the dissertation and the opportunity to strengthen a literary reading of critical instantiations of student agency within the community. And while I’m still wading knee-deep into this theory building component of my dissertation, I was reminded of a bit of theoretical interconnections dealing with velocity and knot-tying I’ve written about in the past. I long ago linked back to this review dealing with the fleeting nature of the thrill in hunting the white elephant in popular culture. Below, I wax lengthily on the historical context and timelessness found in the continued output of Sonic Youth. (Review now updated with relevant links! Huzzah!)

 

Sonic Youth

Sonic Nurse

Geffen

By Antero Garcia 

It would be a simple and rather enticing affair to don the ubiquitous role of the Magister Ludi and play the ever-important Glass Bead Game with Sonic Youth, labeling, connecting, imbuing the band with the inner workings of the universe. And, I think, to a certain extent, the members of the band want us to play the game, to tinge the world an ecto-green with the noise yr witnessing on each record. We can play connect the dots and build the elaborate, if still unseen, spider web of connections between the band and every breathing, living, existing object in the world. There is a familiarity in each moment of this album, how are we to connect it? And to whom?

Immediately the first track echoes the charging, dismal feeling of “Hyperstation” from the awe-instilling Trilogy off of Daydream Nation. The off kilter riff, akin to the Mighty Mouse theme, harks that yes, Sonic Youth – the Sonic Youth you grew up with and fell in love with music by, that same Sonic Youth that stands in the face of all things conventional, that trumpet the outside and the unknown – is truly here to save the day. The same riff which felt utterly banal and sardonically hopeless as the band utters “Smashed-up against a car at three a.m. Kids just up for basketball, beat me in my head,” is now elevated to true heroics. We’re talking life and death, friends lost forever, growing up, being serious, 9/11. And it’s all purred lovingly by Ms. Kim Gordon. That the song is titled “Pattern Recognition” only further emphasizes the deliberate mimicry of the band’s past output.

Though “Pattern Recognition” is the most blatant nod to SY’s massive discontinuity, that sense of renewed vigor, it seems clear that the band was thrown back 15-20 years into their past the day two planes were jettisoned into the World Trade Center, across the street from the band’s office on Murray Street. This, artistically, is a deconstructed rupture. Though this is most clearly harked to on 2002’s stunning return to form, the post-9/11 American exterior is still a lurking presence on Sonic Nurse. We are still bruised as we listen and tenderly traversing toward the new musical terrain as the band takes its time to sift through the ashes and rubble and see what it can salvage of itself, what needs to be reinvented. If Murrary Street finds the band lost, in dispossession of itself, Sonic Nurse finds the quartet offering solace, searching for amenities, shelter, regrowth. Theirs is a record of reassurance and rekindling. By no stretch of the imagination am I labeling this as “happy,” but there is a sense of coming to accepting the past, of filing the last three years in a nearby folder for constant reference. This too becomes part of the familiar and interconnected world, and we again envelope ourselves with the fictitious role in Herman Hesse’s novel: there he is, the Magister Ludi, sliding the small pebble – completely unvictoriously as the Glass Bead Game is not one of wining or losing, but of maintaining balance, of keeping the world in check – into its slot next to the WTC, next to New York, and, in their own sense, nest to patriotism.

“Dripping Dream” opens swathed in a sea of feedback, it’s umbilical cord still tied to the band’s Glenn Branca-ian  past while simultaneously sucking on the teat of Washing Machine. Soon kicking into a traditional – snare on the 2s and 4s – ditty, this is Sonic Youth in a comforting niche. Slightly off-kilter from the mainstream, these are our music’s grandparents. They show us how to do it, and they do it well. So many bands would do well to learn the lessons being preached in such a song. Wilco, The Jicks, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Le Tigre, Yo La Tengo (who, with the husband/wife thing also going, have a lot in common with the charging forward band), Weird War, and dare I even look to more “upstanding” and “mainstream artists?” This is, perhaps, a good enough portrait to see just how far the tendrils of the band stretch, whom they have penetrated, which they claim as their own, and whom are thus in debt to the band.

Beads, beads, beads. The world is a series of knots, suggests one exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Through Sonic Youth, we are reinterpreting, unraveling the ball of twine that distances you and I like frayed wire on the head of Shakespeare’s maiden. We are pulled apart, dissected, and labeled. We find identity in being separate, as alien as the concept may be.

The few disparate moments in Sonic Nurse, those that do not comply with the ethic of adhering to their past, the moments that feel unhinged from both the outside world and the insular warmth of Sonic Youth’s unseen omnipotence, fee almost like place holders for areas that are to be ventured in the future, placards that would read “coming soon” in the barren, cantankerous museum hall of our minds. Are you seeing the frayed ends of the devilish know? “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” (which made a previous appearance on a split record earlier this year as “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” … damn those fat wallets protecting Mariah’s good name!) is about as far as the band is willing to venture into the SYR-avant-garde the band quietly, independently releases. And even hear is a chorus, a verse, amid cacophony and grating noise this is still, unmistakably, a “song.” We can’t let our little chicks deviate too far from us, can we? While we’re here, discussing the rise of the Kim Gordon who can sing in a way that is actually listenable (at last!) (for once!), why not throw in some connections with the neophytes like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Peaches. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind. We’re all connected in here somewhere. Are you unraveling this knot like I am?

“It’s later than it seems,” the band warns on “Paper Cup Exit,” a building and tense song that wryly dares to remake a song that’s already been made before… new ears are listening. We are writing our own ending here, one that is continuing to be rewritten on the fly as we thrust forward, and parry to the left. [The end is coming soon now. Can you feel it? You’ve earned it. But, before you reach the concluding words in this rather long, uneventful treatise, I want to offer a bit of a warning. I intend to end with a quote from Sonic Youth that is not lifted from their last album. It’s going to be from an earlier album, one some would say is their most popular, others would say their best. I’m going to do this because – can you not see it by now? – the past and present and future have all commingled within the terms of Sonic Nurse. To look back we reach forward. Redeconstructionism gentrified, courtesy of Geffen Records for the unassuming time travelers at Best Buy and Amoeba Music. When I make this quote, I can say with a certain degree of confidence, I’m still quoting the present; by quoting a record from the ‘80s, I am directly quoting Sonic Nurse. My apologies for the lengthy interruption. On with the show.] Remember our past, connect it to the future, and with a massive power chord that’s improvised on the fly in a tuning that no one has yet invented, blow it away; a discarded kiss to everybody and nobody: “It’s an anthem in a vacuum in a hyperstation, daydreaming days in a daydream nation.”

Your Summer Syllabus: Three Recent Examples of Participatory Media that Teachers Should Know About (Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy Ahead)

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My browser is overcrowded with tabs of information I want to share here. Instead of focusing on a single example, I want to briefly reflect on three different aspects of the shifting nature of culture in participatory media: community, copyright, and civic engagement. By looking at all three of these, educators can get a quick & robust snapshot of what is on the horizon for pedagogical implications vis-à-vis all of this “new media stuff.”  The examples below speak to three different ways that media and culture are changing the ways young people are learning, interacting, and acting upon the world. For teachers, all three of these bring up significant ways that pedagogy needs to shift. (I’ve called this, previously, Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy.)

 

How to Have the Number One Book on Amazon Without Actually Finishing It

When it comes to YA literature, John Green’s works are not only a personal favorite, but also a consistent hit with my students. During the final days of June, John Green went live on YouTube to his legion of fans and (over the course of nearly two hours) announced the title of his new book, answered questions being sent in real time, and read a chapter from the unreleased work. He also announced he was going to sign every copy of the first edition of the book. As a result, The Fault in Our Stars shot to number one on Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites & Green’s work was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, and media sites are pointing to the phenomenon of the sudden sales. What’s important to notice here is specifically how this happened. Green didn’t go online overnight and simply announce the book title (as mainstream media like WSJ signals). Instead, this has been a sustained relationship with readers that has developed trust and identity. John announced that the title came from someone within his online community. Fans have created tons of covers for the book. John’s hosting an online book club that’s reading the Great Gatsby. He has a series of video exchanges with his brother. He interacts with readers through twitter constantly. If anything, part of the fun of being a “fan” of John Green is being able to interact & engage with other readers, the author, and other artifacts in varying degrees of intensity. Spending some time meandering across his official site, his tumblr, his various twitter accounts, and fan pages is a great way for educators to think about ways to collaborate and share the learning experience with young people.

The Good, the Bad, and the Bloop of Fair Use & Copyright

Do you like Kind of Blue? How many times have you heard a soloist riff on those opening bars of “So What”? And while the music is constantly pointed to as a vanguard album in the history of jazz, a recent reinterpretation of the music finds itself a useful case study in when art appropriation exceeds “Fair Use.” I’m regularly talking about the importance of discussing fair use, copyright, and Creative Commons with young people; I’m convinced that this is a space that  students need to explicitly understand as we shift toward a cultural shift from merely consumption to production. This case study, “Kind of Screwed,” is a fantastic introduction into the challenges that are being faced across artistic mediums. Related to this, I regularly either include Free Culture or the film RIP: A Remix Manifesto in courses I teach to teachers about media and technology- both of these are great resources for further investigation on this topic.

 

The Fall of Eve – Commercial Interests & Citizen Dissent

Think of Eve Online as the geekier, way (way) more complex version of World of Warcraft. With political and corporate intrigue at the center of a game that takes place on ships and in fleets of aircrafts, Eve isn’t as widely played in the U.S. as other MMORPGs. However, that hasn’t stopped EVE’s distributor, CCP, from cashing in on game updates & expansions. In doing so, the company’s revealed a strategy that is more interested in a bottom line profit than in continued support of a long term player community. The result? Nearly 5,000 subscribed players walking away from the game and community. Digging through forum postings and news articles, a clear tension between creator and user emerges. And while teachers aren’t likely to utilize EVE Online in daily instruction (though the class that does has got to be an interesting one, no?), the way that these players are signaling dissent within the game, through canceled subscription and through collective organizing demonstrate how civic engagement is reshaped through participatory media. There are past examples of this kind of work described by researchers, particularly in America’s Army and the Sims, for those who want to look at other work in this area.

 

Summing Up

While all of the examples above have related precedents, they point to the fuzzy edges of socio-cultural interaction that most educators aren’t thinking about. They are all from within the past two weeks and are related to the kinds of practices our students are engaged in every day. When are we, as educators, going to formally sketch out a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the paradigm shift that affects our classrooms?

 

 

Transitions: Manual Arts, The Department of Education, and Stepping into the Productivity of the Summer

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Thursday was the final day of the school year at Manual Arts. It was the end of a very long year with significant changes. As the students left the school, they walked away from a campus that has been under constant operation for nearly a decade. This will be the first summer since I’ve worked at Manual Arts that the school is not in session (aside from a paltry summer school offering). What will the school’s return to a traditional calendar look like next year? Will student, teacher, and parent concerns about security at the overcrowded campus be addressed? Will we adequately meet the needs of students in classes that are averaged at 40 students per teacher? Will the incredible (absolutely incredible) graffiti murals at our school be painted over? (Strong signs point to yes.)

Thursday was also my final day as an official employee of the U.S. Department of Education. And though my role as a 2010-2011 Teaching Ambassador Fellow has come to an end, I am excited about the network of individuals I have been able to talk with and from whom I hope to continue to draw expertise on future projects.

This summer, I am focusing on coding, analyzing, and writing up preliminary findings for my dissertation. I am also teaching a few classes in and around L.A. and will be consulting for a few education-related projects. I hope to share information about these in future posts.

I am also pleased to be working with the Schools for Community Action design team. We are developing four amazing (amazing!) small schools to serve the South Central Los Angeles community. The work before us is exciting, difficult, and (occasionally) overwhelming. You are welcome to join us. At the least, please consider following us on Twitter.

I am excited to share a bunch of other work in the coming weeks:

  • I am beginning to play around with Google Plus (thank you all mighty Twitter for coming through with a speedy invite!) and can’t wait to talk about how I see it playing a transformative role in schools.
  • There have been some exciting conversations brewing related to the NBPTS Take One program within my school.
  • I will eventually take issue with Jaime Oliver (while still enjoying the occasional burger at Patra’s).
  • I’m taking down the “Teacher of the Year” program.
  • I’ve got a serious problem with capitalism and creating “lifelong readers”
  • And finally, I have a series of ongoing thoughts about what I have learned from Sadie, my basset hound companion that passed away earlier this week (I am still, slowly, coming to terms with the quietness of the house now that she’s gone, but will be sharing the lessons she’s taught – in her slow, stubborn way – as the time feels right).

I can’t wait to get to all of this! And if you are interested in engaging in an American Crawl conversation and want to collaborate here, this is your official invitation to reach out and make this happen. School’s out! Time for learning!

 

Thinking About Video Games, Narrative, and Freedom

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[This post is shared, intended for, and written as a resource at the Digital Is site for the National Writing Project. If – for some silly reason – you haven’t been over there, please take a look.]

Reading the article, “Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noir,” by Tom Bissell I was left with several significant thoughts and questions about the role of video games on learning, media, and how we teach storytelling and writing.

Though quite lengthy, I encourage you to read through this resource – though the comments below can be read as a stand alone reflection on video games at large, the review is a useful case-study of how narrative shifts in storytelling affect player freedom and understanding of choice.
What’s at the heartof this inquiry is a tension that exists between video games and story. Specifically, can a video game act as a useful means to convey narrative? As an English teacher and as a writer, I question whether my intentions as a writer – to recount a specific narrative, to persuade and effectively defend a thesis – can be adequately represented in a video game. And even if these ideas are in a game, will it ultimately be a fun one?

A popular game series  many of my students (and youth around the world play) is the Grand Theft Auto saga. In these, players may undertake specific missions driving around cities to meet various objectives sand move up the ranks in a city’s organized crime underbelly. At the same time, however, most of my students usually play the game with a more broad understanding of the game’s purpose: cause as much chaos as possible. Driving over pedestrians, getting into glorified shoot outs with law enforcement, creating spectacular crashes, explosions, and city-wide damage, most of my students appreciate the game platform as a space for exploration and play. It is a giant sandbox filled with digitalized violence. Your ethical concerns aside, I question how the developers (writers) of these games feel about this approach. Clearly, there is a loose narrative that students are supposed to adhere to. Clearly, most of them do not.

I should make it clear that I think this is okay. The freedom to resist narrative and to resist societal conventions (to specifically push against them) is exactly what makes these games so engaging for young people…and probably cause the kinds of fear mongering about violence and video games that are monthly headlines in grocery-store magazine displays.

However, the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series have recently released a new game. L.A. Noire (as detailed in the article). In it, opportunities for chaos still can be found. However, this game has a very specific narrative vision. It adheres to traditional storytelling narrative arches. There are things like denouement in its final moments. But with this narrative comes a much more limited scope of choice. The player, though posed with options and-at times a broad area to play and explore-ultimately must take specific paths, choices, and steps in order to proceed. In fact, the game doesn’t really provide much choice at all.

As creating games becomes easier and cheaper, it will become the kind of literacy practice that – I imagine – will be second nature in ELA classrooms in the near future. If this holds true, what kinds of lessons do we develop about teaching choice, agency, and power within video game design?

Similarly, in addition to looking at images of race and class and literary elements in video games, how do we get students to write and think critically about agency and power when they play these games? In essence, by playing a game, a player is essentially committed to a programmed contract that forces them to adhere to the rules, laws, and conventions of social behavior that are designed into the game’s architecture.

This may seem like a superficial discussion, but I caution us, as educators, to think specifically about what video games inculcate in students about power, authority and the way they understand & synthesize information. By garroting a game’s scope, its designer is afforded the freedom to closely “tell” a narrative. However, it will take more innovative game design for a video game to allow open ended exploration that can “show” a narrative based on player free will. This tension between choice and narrative is one that needs to be conveyed in our lesson plans and in our classrooms. How we design our classrooms, establish class rules, and set agendas are no different than digital walls and required button mashing in the stereotypical first person shooter our students play daily.

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

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Mark recorded an on-the-fly interview with one of my 9th graders on one of the few days that he’s been on campus. To say that he’s been someone I’ve struggled to connect with is an understatement. I really appreciate Mark’s prodding and the student’s candid reflections. However, even as he notes his self-defeating actions, I question where we (Mark, myself, his other teachers past and present) could have done better. What are the structures in place and the policies enforced that made it possible — easy even — for this student to choose to slip by?

BitCoins and De-centering Education

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[post title and “de-centering” in general is being adapted from language in this book.]

In the past month, a typical conversation with me usually involves bitcoins [relax, I’ll explain these in a minute].

It typically involves bitcoins and hyperbole.

It typically goes something like this:

– Hey [interrupting and changing the topic of conversation abruptly] – have you heard of bitcoins?

– No.

– I hadn’t either until recently. I’m basically trying to find someone to tell me why I shouldn’t invest in them, because they sounds like they’re going to kinda take over the world.

– What are they…

What Are they?

That’s where I get confused… I’m not really sure.

As I read more about them and follow random message boards the best I can get is that a bitcoin is a digital currency. Here’s a great, digestible video about bitcoins:


 

 

So what?

So here’s the thing: a bitcoin isn’t tied to any government, is constantly limited in quantity (theoretically making them steadily increase in value over time) and can be traded anonymously.

There’s a whole bunch of technical stuff behind all of this and the market of exchange for bitcoins is so small that single investors can regularly change the value of a bitcoin – in the past week I saw the value of a bitcoin jump from $6 to over $30.

[Edit 6/13: and Boom! a day after posting, the Economist writes a feature on bitcoins.]
 

Why does this matter?

Last month, the U.S. government effectively shut down online poker playing within the country. I know this because it happened while I was playing (I was supposed to be writing… but don’t worry about that). One minute I’m in a hand of limit hold-em, running outside to check the mail and the next, I come back to find out I am no longer weclomed at this table. Because I am playing with U.S. dollars, the U.S. government and its laws control what I do and what kinds of activities I engage in. Sure, I get it.

However, what happens when we de-center money from government?

The short answer is I don’t know … and I bet it can be problematic. Already there are smatterings of articles about the fact that bitcoins can (and in some cases are) being used to buy almost anything – from Alpaca socks to illicit drugs.

Again, no one person or entity controls or owns bitcoins. I am sure various national governments are keeping an eye on the fledging efforts to democratize currency (especially as a bi-product of bitcoins, namecoins, make currency tied even more closely to personal control).

So Here’s the Thing – Time for Some Ed. Talk

In the past publishing was controlled by nations and (much later) large corporations. McLuhan makes clear the nationalistic purposes the printing press played in reifing specific traits and identity within a nascent print-literate nation.

What’s happened to how we engage with writing, literature, and the nature of publishing now that the internet has made it a “free” enterprise? As we see explosions in creativity, expansion in discourse, and newly entangled struggles between old-world copyright and new-world Creative Commons-like control, one thing is certain: cutting the tether between publishing and a select few corporate entities has profound paragidm shifts on culture, interaction, and learning.

Bitcoins – whether they take off or a rival product emerges – are poised to do the same thing for currency that the internet has done for publishing. How much more do we shift toward a Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.) when we are no longer held to ordained commerce?

And here’s where I’m more concerned: even if bitcoins don’t take off, I’ve been thinking about an educational parallel. What happens to education when it too becomes decentered from specific forms of government and definitions of citizenship? I write this not from a purely anarchistic perspective. My research is largely concerned with civic engagement and how young people formulate or understand their own civic identity. What happens to democratic education when it is also democratized? Perhaps this is a shift toward a TAZ of educational reform – instead of districts tied to cities, states, and the country, schooles may be aligned to principles, common interests, etc. And where do standards fit into this? Perhaps more than anywhere else, we see educational standards continue to play the role the printing press did in the sixteenth century – without standards, do our schools lose their identity as “American”? Is this necessarily a bad thing? We’re not exactly talking coins anymore, are we? The premise of a bitcoin, however, is what’s begun this line of thought for me.

Presently, I have my finger poised above the equivalent of the “buy” button on Mt. Gox (the central site for exchange of bitcoins) – I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but I’m curious enough to exchange a capital I know well for one I don’t if it means getting to participate in a new mode of exchange.

 

Sharing “Local Labor Management Relationships as a Vehicle to Advance Reform”

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The U.S. Department of Education has just released Local Labor Management Relationships as a Vehicle to Advance Reform, a collaborative report of twelve case studies highlighting Labor & Management collaboration for student achievement. Along with an incredible cadre of educators, I was privileged to write one of these case studies. Centered around work and ideas shared at a summit that took place in Denver in February, the report’s abstract, as printed on this page, follows. Thank you Jonathan Eckert for an incredible job editing and compiling this work over the past three months.

In February 2011, the U.S. Department of Education (ED)—along with co‐sponsors from the American Association of School Administrators, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council of the Great City Schools, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the National Education Association, and the National School Boards Association—brought together over 150 school districts at a conference called “Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor Management Collaboration.” Twelve districts noteworthy for the partnership of their district, board, and teacher organization facilitated conversations with district leaders and others in attendance at the conference. This paper attempts to capture what these noteworthy local partnerships have accomplished and, more importantly, how they accomplished it. ED commissioned present and former Teaching Ambassador Fellows, teachers selected for one‐year leadership assignments, to conduct this work. The fellows used interviews, document analysis, and digital audio recordings of presentations made by district leaders to learn from the opportunities and challenges, the successes and missteps of these 12 district partnerships. The introduction to the paper, written by Jonathan Eckert, Professor of Education at Wheaton College, synthesizes the patterns in both the work being done by the districts and how they are doing it.